Story formats: Elements of text

Use the story formats in the menu on the right to pitch a story for CERN's core site. The text below describes rules for each element you might use when writing a story for CERN.

Word count

All word counts provided below are maxima for each content type in English. Add 30% to the word count for French - e.g. Announcements are 200 words in English, 260 in French.

NB this does not apply where limits are set in characters. E.g. Headlines are 60 characters regardless of the language.

Use the following maximum word counts for content types on the public website. These formats are defined in detail under Formats tab above. You'll notice from the table that word counts in French are 30% longer.

ENGLISH

FRENCH

FORMAT

word count

character count

word count

character count

announcement

200

1260

260

1640

timeline event

300

1890

390

2460

update (news)

400

2525

520

3280

blog

500

3155

650

4100

press release

500

3155

650

4100

explainer

600

3800

780

4920

feature

1200

7580

1560

9830

Headline (“Head”) [60-character maximum]

A headline is a short statement (60-character maximum, including spaces) that should entice readers to read on. It should grab their attention and interest, and give them an idea of what to expect in the story. Headlines should be understandable on their own. Use active verbs where possible ("Experiment opens at CERN"; "LHCb discovers new particle") unless the impact is stronger in the passive ("Higgs boson discovered").

Puns and references to popular culture are welcome, but be careful - many of those reading CERN content in English are not mother-tongue English speakers. Remember also that puns may be lost in translation to French.

As always, the most important thing is to think of the readers and remember that we are writing headlines for their benefit, not for our own amusement or to show how clever we are.

Strapline (“Strap”) [150-character maximum]

Straps are a maximum of 150 characters, including spaces.

The strap gives added “teaser” information not included in the headline, providing a succinct summary of the most important points of the article. It tells the reader what to expect, and invites them to find out more.

Byline

The writer's name. Only displayed for news, features and blogs.

Body

The main part of the article or web page – the text. The maximum word count refers only to this part, and depends on the content type.

Image caption

Image captions are a maximum of 255 characters (including spaces), and must include a credit in round brackets in the format "(Image: Name/Organization)" Note the space after the colon, and there is no punctuation at the end of the caption.

Text

The image caption should be directly linked to the body text. So instead of:

The Antiproton Decelerator (Image: CERN)

Write:

The Antiproton Decelerator slows antiprotons and delivers them to the ALPHA experiment (Image: CERN)

Credit

Image captions must always include a credit in the format "Image: Name/Organization"

Credit the person first, and separate words with a "/" all-closed up.

CORRECT

INCORRECT

Image: CERN

Image:CERN

Image: CERN.

Image: Joe Bloggs/CERN

Image: CERN/Joe Bloggs

Image: Joe Bloggs/CERN.

Subheading [5-word maximum]

Subheadings break up text into manageable chunks for the reader. Five words max. They should entice the reader to continue, rather than describe accurately the next part of the text.

"In this post" block

"In this post" is a semi-colon separated list of up to four key points in the post. It appears in the left sidebar at medium to large screen sizes (not on phones). The reader should be able to get the main points of the article from a quick scan of the "In this post" block.

A list might look something like:

Higgs boson found

New particle has a mass of 126 GeV

Physicists to measure its spin and charge

Use a maximum of four points. Keep each bullet point to a maximum of 40 characters including spaces. Write in a telegraphic style, separating the sentences with semi-colons.

Use for the following content types on the CERN website: Updates for all audiences, Explainers, Stubs for topic pages

"Further information" paragraph

These are chunks of text of varying lengths, presented below the main body to provide extra context or technical background. Link to this paragraph from the main text above, with the words "See below". The "further info" text is included in the word count for the content type. (You cannot add a paragraph to pan out an article that is already at its maximum word count). Technical explanations can sometimes slow the flow of an article. A further info paragraph solves the problem by giving the reader a choice of when to read it. Image/graph optional.

Footnote

Footnotes only appear in press releases. A footnote is a standardized paragraph that gives background information about CERN, its experiments or external organizations, for the benefit of editors and journalists.

Footnotes should be hyperlinked on the page to the word they describe.

Example:

Geneva, 15 March 2012. An experiment at CERN1 today showed that the Higgs boson is actually a Biggs hoson. Physicists on the CMS2 experiment were shocked by the revelation.

Bla blab la….

Footnote: 1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

2. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving more than 3000 scientists, engineers, and students from 172 institutes in 40 countries.

The HTML looks like this:

<p> Geneva, 15 March 2012. An experiment at CERN<sup><a href="#footnote1">1</a></sup> today showed that the Higgs boson is actually a Biggs hoson.</p>

<p><a name="footnote1">1</a>. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.</p>

<p><a name="footnote2">2</a>. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving more than 3000 scientists, engineers, and students from 172 institutes in 40 countries.</p>

A note about Drupal: Text formats

On any Drupal site under Configuration > Content authoring > Text formats you can set the configuration for which HTML tags users with different permissions can use.

It's important to limit which tags users can use for security purposes.

Allow only the following HTML tags for the "Filtered HTML" text format: